My arguments on vacation have always been dreary — disagreements with my mom on how far to walk before setting up a beach umbrella, squabbles with friends over where to eat — but other people’s vacation arguments are sinister and seductive. Or at least they are in books, and especially in Scarlett Thomas’s 11th novel, “The Sleepwalkers,” as a couple’s trip abroad in a dazzling, dangerous territory (a landscape familiar from Highsmith and Hitchcock, “La Piscine” and Françoise Sagan) is derailed by latent tensions.
At the start of “The Sleepwalkers,” Evelyn and Richard are on a Greek island for their honeymoon. As they talk and drink carafes of wine, their conversation wrinkles with the private riptides of aggression and jealousy that flow under their relationship. Both of them have been lying, and now they are far from home, exposed by the “kind of heat in which secrets melt, like beef tallow.”
The entire island is suffused with threat and intrigue, from the bruised pomegranates that fall off the trees and dot the island’s paths to the hornets that fly by, “bright as a bullet, drunk on the end of summer and the glut of fruit.” Everything seems to be hot, on the boil. Nearly every interaction holds the possibility of betrayal or violence.
The central mystery of the novel seems to be what happened at Evelyn and Richard’s wedding to send them into such turmoil. Except the story crackles with little distortions: Mirrors and bird cages appear with eerie frequency, paintings vanish from a wall, and other oddities complicate the narrative. Evelyn and Richard also learn about the ypnovátes, the sleepwalkers, a couple who drowned on the island the summer before.
So is this a ghost story, or a time loop, or a memory play? For Thomas, nothing seems to be off the table. She shifts between erotic thrills, gothic drama, postmodern deconstruction and kitchen-sink realism. Through her bold storytelling, “The Sleepwalkers” becomes a work of peculiar, gonzo genius.
The story is told through letters, notes, guest book pages and other documents. We encounter 17 audacious pages of an uncorrected, almost illegible audio transcript. Elsewhere, gaps appear in paragraphs where someone else, presumably, has erased the writing. Some of the documents that make up the book have been torn or burned, which makes sense — the pages are as damaged and degraded as the characters themselves.
Exploitation, in different forms, emerges again and again in “The Sleepwalkers.” During university, Evelyn worked as a housekeeper for Richard’s family. Evelyn recalls how his mother insisted she eat “with them, treating her like a daughter almost. A daughter who cleans.” Now an actor and playwright, Evelyn is still trying to understand her employers’ power over her. Richard downplays his wife’s former position in his family home, and his own relative privilege. In a section of the novel rendered through one of his letters, he writes, “People assume they can know about someone else’s past because of their gender, or their social class, or their parents. Try asking them instead about the secret alliances they made, and who was blackmailing them, and the secrets they’d rather die than own. Ask them about their shame, and their darkness.” By the time they arrive at their honeymoon, both Evelyn and Richard have been eroded by large-scale forces as powerful as the storm that sweeps away the island’s beach every fall.
Reading “The Sleepwalkers,” I was wrong about so much; I wasn’t even looking in the right direction, and that process of disorientation felt corrective and necessary. Thomas takes a glamorous late-capitalist setting, with rosé and catamarans, and shreds, twists and warps it into a story that is surprising, humane and political to its bones.
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